I love my compost bucket (thanks, Bennett), but I always try to think of ways to keep things out of it. Compost isn’t exactly food waste, but I believe in finding a way to use something before finding a way to recycle it. I’m by no means perfect at this. I still occasionally find a whole cucumber or half a bunch of herbs moldy and slimy in the fridge. Very grrrr enducing, but perhaps a sad fact of a life of overabundance.

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have noticed that I’ve been doing a lot of fruit fermentation this summer. It’s fun, it’s tasty, and for the uninitiated, it’s a very easy sell. “Try my deliciously stinky sauerkraut” may not go over in every crowd, but “Here’s some probiotic plum soda you might like,” pretty much does.

The only problem with sodas (and country wines to a lesser degree) is that there does tend to be a decent amount of flavor left in the fruit when it’s time to strain it out. I just can’t bring myself to discard it. So instead, I sauce it. We eat applesauce with abandon here in the US, so why not plum, peach or apricot sauce? There is no good reason, especially when the resulting sauces are so inexplicably silky!

This plum sauce has the silkiest texture! All the sauces I’ve made this way do.

A couple fun facts:

These fruit sauces will become effervescent and alcoholic if left in the fridge for any length of time. If you’re giving these to the kiddos, make it fast.

Sauce made from soda fruit will be pretty sweet. Not quite jam sweet, but still, sweet. That’s why I recommend these as an addition to dessert. My husband likes to mix these into his oatmeal, though, so if you can do sugar in the am, go for it!

You may have noticed a peach version of this sauce pictured in the post on oat crepes.

I’ve made this sauce with lots of stone fruits, but pip fruits should work, too. Berries are not a great option. As always, feel free to give it a try, but the berries I’ve tried alone haven’t tasted great or had a very nice texture.

Yield will vary depending on the batch of beverage you’re starting with, . From a recent one gallon soda, I ended up with 2.5 cups of sauce. From a 3 gallon batch of wine, I had 3/4 of a gallon of peach sauce! We’re still working through that one and it’s definitely tasty but no longer suitable for breakfast, save a hair-of-the-dog style meal.

Texture and thickness are up to you. I like to keep this spoonable, so a quick run through the food processor is all it needs. If you want a thinner sauce, you could also run it through the food mill to take out the bits of skin.

Fermented Fruit Sauce Recipe

The first several steps of this recipe is actually the first several steps from soda making. Try peach or plum soda for best results. (Just want to make soda? Try Black Currant or Strawberry Basil, too.) I love making this sauce to use the byproducts of soda, but if you want to just go straight to sauce, you can skip the water altogether and just mix and stir fruit and sugar in a covered container, without without kefir whey, à la fruit cocktail recipe I published a couple years ago. When it’s good and bubbly, you’ll just puree it.

INGREDIENTS

2 pounds of stone fruit, washed

1 cup of cane sugar (yes, you can use less sugar and/or substitute for other types of natural sweetener)

1/2 cup kefir whey (optional, but if you want this to be probiotic, you’ll need to use a probiotic starter like kefir whey)

1 teaspoon lemon zest (optional)

HOW-TO

Roughly chop fruit and compost their pits.

Put fruit into a 1-gallon or larger vessel and toss with sugar. Allow to macerate for an hour or so, until the fruit is mostly covered in juice. Pour in 8 cups of filtered water, kefir whey and lemon zest. If you overfill your vessel, it will spill when you start stirring, so don’t go fuller than halfway.

Using a long and strong wooden or plastic spoon, stir vigorously, creating a tornado-like vortex in the center of your container. Stirring is an incredibly important step. At this stage, the yeast want oxygen to be active and replicate, and stirring is how you give them that air supply. Continue stirring as vigorously and as frequently as you can, a minimum of twice a day. The more you stir, the sooner your ferment will become active.

Cover the container with a clean kitchen cloth and rubber band. At this stage, you want air in. Depending on temperature, how frequently and vigorously you stir, how fresh your kefir whey was and how concerned you are with alcohol content (shorter fermentation for less booze), you’ll continue stirring and recovering for 12 hours to 3 days.

When the fruit has risen to surface and you see a lot of bubbling when you stir, you’re ready to make sauce. Strain out the liquid and reserve head over to a soda recipe to find out what to do with that.

It’s time to get saucing. Once the liquid is drained, you have the fruit that you’ll be turning into sauce. You can definitely stick it in the fridge in a tight fitting container for a day or so if you’re more focused on making soda than sauce at that particular moment.

Place the strained fruit into a food processor or blender and turn on at full speed. If you like something a little chunkier, reserve about a quarter of the fruit and add it back in after blending.

Store in the fridge and serve on oatmeal, in crepes, drizzled over ice cream, or eat it with a spoon.

I was not planning on sharing this recipe but the richness of the fizzified shiso and the color of this beaut swayed me to share. This was a backup soda that I tested for an upcoming fermentation dinner I’m doing (very exciting!) with Food Underground,* but after just a couple test batches I’m a convert.

If you read this blog or have taken soda classes with me in the past, you probably know that I grow and love purple shiso. I think it adds that je ne sais quoi to my potluck soda offerings and to many other ferments. And while all sodas are not probiotic, not even all fermented ones, this one is made with kefir whey, so it is. For a vegan or dairy-free version, try using something like this fermented bulgur liquid or finished water kefir or coconut water kefir in place of kefir whey, but do be aware that they have the potential to impact the flavor more than the relatively neutral tasting kefir whey.

As for plums, I like to use a sweet/tart plum variety for soda. Santa Rosa plums are my favorite (I will admit that it’s in part because they’re GORGEOUS), but just about any plum will do. Go for purple or red varieties to get that bright red hue.

Plum Shiso Soda Recipe

Yield: 4 liters

This soda will age nicely (and eventually become wine) in the fridge, however remember that any time you’re bottling without measuring the conversion of sugar into alcohol (and especially when you’re intentionally leaving fermentable sugars in there for carbonation and sweetness), there is a risk of explosion. Explosions are not a joke, and exploding glass bottles are seriously dangerous. For that reason, I always bottle soda in plastic bottles. Recycled two liters are excellent vessels, and they’re intended to keep the carbonation trapped, so they’re less prone to explosions and leaks, and more apt to give you a delightfully bubbly soda. I soak mine overnight with soapy water to get the flavors of the soda out of the vessel, and then rinse thoroughly with cool water to get the soap out.

Do take care when opening fermented sodas. There are plenty of sugars left to ferment when you bottle, so they’ll geyser if you let them!

Equipment

1-gallon or larger crock or open container**

Long wooden or plastic spoon

Fine- or medium-mesh strainer

Funnel

Two 2 liter bottles that seal well enough to trap carbonation (see headnote)

Ingredients

2 pounds plums (seconds are great for this!)

1/2 cup packed shiso leaves (okay to leave the stems on)

2 cups cane sugar (or more to taste)

8 cups filtered water, plus more to fill bottles

1/2 cup kefir whey

2/3 cup lemon juice (or more to taste)

How-to

Put plums into a 1-gallon or larger vessel and toss with sugar. Allow to macerate for an hour or so, until the plums are steeping their own juice. Add shiso and toss it all together. Pour in 8 cups of filtered water, kefir whey and lemon juice. If you overfill your vessel, you’ll be quite unhappy later, so try to keep it to about half full.

Using a long and strong wooden or plastic spoon, stir vigorously, creating a tornado-like vortex in the center of your container. If you overfilled, this is when you’ll feel it: when the contents of your crock spill out onto the countertops. Stirring is an incredibly important step. At this stage, the yeast want oxygen to be active and replicate, and stirring is how you give them that air supply. Continue stirring as vigorously and as frequently as you can, a minimum of twice a day. The more you stir, the sooner your ferment will become active and the sooner you get to drink it!

Cover the container with a kitchen cloth and rubber band. At this stage, you want air in, but no dust or passing buggies. Depending on temperature, how frequently and vigorously you stir, how fresh your kefir whey was and how concerned you are with alcohol content (shorter fermentation for less booze), you’ll continue stirring and recovering for 12 hours to 3 days.

When the plums and shiso have risen to surface and you see a lot of bubbling when you stir, you’re almost ready for bottling. Strain out the plums and shiso and reserve for another use or compost. Taste the liquid with a clean spoon (don’t double dip). If it needs a bit more acid, add some lemon juice, a tablespoon at a time. If it’s not quite sweet enough after those first, sugar-devouring days of fermentation, add a bit more sugar (1/4 to 1/2 cup is the most I ever add).

Stir to incorporate additional sugar and lemon juice and then split the mix evenly between your two bottles. Add filtered water to the bottles until they are full to about 3 inches from the top. Secure the lids and set them in a room temperature spot away from direct sunlight.

Once the bottle has become rigid (test by squeeze the sides), you know it’s carbonated. The timing on this will depend on a few things (like temperature), so it could be anywhere from 8 to 24 hours later. In the winter, it can take a few days. Chill it in the fridge for at least an hour before opening.

Open with care! My kitchen ceiling is permanently strawberry soda-stained, and there’s no reason for that to happen to you.

Long term storage in the fridge is not recommended because explosions are a thing, even in plastic!

Cherry scrap vinegar, new SCOBY forming. Make sure to strain those SCOBY pieces out before storing your vinegar

Vinegar is transformative in just about any dish. The best thing about it is that if you have sugar, you can make it from almost anything! I do. I make it from whatever scraps I have lying around the kitchen. I’ve got several versions brewing right now, and hopefully I’ll have the chance to tell you about them all. It’s summer after all. The cool thing about having lots of little vials of vinegar around is that they take the work right out of being a creative cook. I’m not a lazy cook. I love to try new things in the kitchen, but I will admit that our weekday meals tend to follow a very simple formula: lots of veg, some kind of grain, maybe an egg or two or some beans. It’s up to the seasonings (aka ferments, in my house) to make these meals jump out and shake their jazz hands. So that’s where all of these vinegars come in. My cupboards look silly, and sometimes an especially small bottle will get lost at the back of the pantry, but I think it’s worth it.

The pits will float to the surface, so make sure you’re stirring regularly to help avoid surface mold. Air is your friend when it comes to making vinegar.

I often hear all fermentation grouped into the “lacto-” category. That’s an inaccurate descriptor for lots of fermented stuff, including vinegar. If you want an “o” at the end here, you’ll have to go with “aceto-.” Vinegar is basically a super-cool process that involves two types of fermentation. First, you have yeast fermentation. That basically takes the sugar in your liquid and converts it to alcohol (among other things), giving you wine. It gets really foamy and exciting, and you can even drink it for a hit of low alcohol wine within the first week, although I personally think that’s a waste of good vinegar for anything beyond a tasty teaspoonful. Quickly, though, the acetobacter that are basically part of the air we breathe, start to turn that wine into vinegar, via acetic fermentation. Once the SCOBY, or mother, forms you kind of want to leave it alone, and let it finish up. In the summer, it’s a good idea to start tasting on the early side (like 2.5 – 3 weeks). If a vinegar over cooks, you get something very acidic, but without much character. I like my vinegars to have a little hint of what they were made from. If I wanted just any old acid, I could squirt some lemon juice on there and be done with it, so I usually err on the side of under-fermented, that way, I can leave it in my cupboard a bit and let it ferment a bit more, if need be.

Side view of those pits. Most of the cherry pieces have broken up and dissolved into the mixture.

Vinegar fermentation will produce a mother. As I mentioned in this old wine vinegar how-to, you definitely do not need a mother to make vinegar, but it makes the process go more quickly. You should start with a little bit of living vinegar, though. If you aren’t in the habit of making your own, just grab some Bragg’s. They got me started on my first batch.

Straining out those pits. See the little SCOBY in there? It formed before I could strain. That’s not ideal.

CHERRY SCRAP VINEGAR

Yields about 2.5 cups of cherry vinegar, and one vinegar mother

Did you read my post yesterday about making a delicious, cherry, fruit cocktail? I hope you saved your pits, because this is how you use them. Flesh to pit fermentation, y’all! You can do this with just about any fruit. I’ve made a wide variety of fruit and herb vinegars and they are pretty much my favorite thing ever.

Ingredients

The pits and “seconds” of 2 lbs of cherries. Exclude cherries with mold on them, or cut out ALL of the mold, but soft ones are totally fine

1/4 cup of sugar (this will be gone by the time you consume your vinegar, so no worries, sugar-fearers)

1/2 cup live vinegar, such as Braggs

Filtered water

How-To

Put your cherry pits and seconds in a quart or (preferably) larger jar.

Pour liquid over pits and cherry bits, ensuring that there is at least some space at the top of the jar. Vinegar fermentation is one area where you want as much air as possible getting at your fermentable material, so the more room in your jar, the better.

Cover the jar with a coffee filter or breathable cloth and secure with a rubber band.

Swirl it around and/or stir thoroughly at least twice a day. After 5-7 days, when bubbling has subsided a bit, drain the liquid into another container and compost the cherry parts.

Re-cover the jar with the liquid in it and let it sit for 2-3 weeks, tasting after 2.5.

Once it tastes like vinegar, you are good to go! Strain it into a container that closely fits the quantity you have left, being sure to remove as many scraps of excess yeast and wispy mother as possible. Air was your friend during fermentation. After fermentation, if will ruin your vinegar, and eventually turn it into water (like magic! chemistry), so again, be sure it’s a tight-fitting container with a tight lid.

See how it’s filled to the brim? That’s what you want. Once fermentation is done, store as airlessly as possible until it’s all used up.